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Comment by farnsworth | Hacker News Reader

Well there are some typical corporate American companies that have this problem. But I would argue that (almost?) all tech companies have this problem.

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What?? Everywhere I worked a screenshot like what she's describing would get you fired. Over office chat even?? It's not even hearsay. Someone can bring up the exact chat history.

That's great! It sounds like you have worked at places that follow the rules.

Please don't use your personal observations to discount the growing collection of evidence that this sort of thing is happening at tech companies around the world, and not just in the bay area.

Is there a centralized repository of this evidence? If not, maybe that would be a good thing to create as a reference.

Think about what you are saying using your brain. It is equivalent to "please stop giving me your anecdotes, because they conflict with these other anecdotes that I like better".

If you're going to use personal experience as evidence for some phenomenon, you need to accept personal experience from every angle, not just the angle that agrees with your perception of the phenomenon.

Fortunately I don't need to think too much about what I am saying on this topic, because this has been an area that's been examined by lawyers, law makers, and researchers for at least 20 years. There is a growing mountain of evidence that can only be ignored by those who are uneducated or unaware of the topic (and no-one in tech other than recent graduates should be at this point). It's time for everyone in tech to stop ignoring the problem, and start publicly and privately calling out any and all bad actors on this even if it destroys the careers of a few "high performers" (even setting aside the fact that said high performers with bad behaviour often drag down the performance of the teams and organizations they are a part of, offsetting any of the gains). Since this is hacker news and not a blog post or paper, I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to find more evidence of that claim - why not start with this http://lmgtfy.com/?q=impact+of+bias+on+team+performance

These are just a short list of samples of articles that are based on surveys, studies, and legal opinions (and that's all I could find in literally the time it took me to pour my espresso this morning).

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1229336?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...

http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias...

http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/men-and-women-biased-...

https://www.wired.com/2014/07/gender-gap/

https://theestablishment.co/new-study-finds-60-of-women-in-t...

https://mic.com/articles/132285/most-women-in-tech-say-they-...

Ok, how many people have you seen get fired for this?

At least one, maybe two.

You're seeing the tip of the iceberg. But keep your head in the sand if it's more comfortable.

What corporate American companies don't have this problem?

Typical business problem around the world.

All?!

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